3 Great Things!

The first week of December brings you more great tips and tools!

This week brings 3 Great ways to connect

Many of our students use social media in one form or another. Faculty may wonder how to integrate social media into their classes. This infographic: 25 Ways Teachers Can Integrate Social Media Into Education provides lots of interesting ways to get your feet wet in using Social Media in your courses. Remember though: to insure there's a clear divide between your personal and professional worlds, create accounts exclusively for academic use and keep those separate from your personal accounts.

The Moodle Choice activity (in your moodle course, with editing turned on, click "add an activity or resource", select Choice) is a great way to encourage students to voice their opinions and chime in on a topic. Choice options include: time limits and anonymous responses. Use a Choice activity to to gain insights on what interests students most about your course, student opinions, or even to schedule presentations. Check out this video for step-by-step set up directions.

One significant way to connect with your students in a Moodle course is to create a social presence in the course. Encourage students to interact with each other and with you. Sharing a little about yourself and have them introduce themselves to the course is a good start. This article shares a few other ideas for creating a social presence in your course that will support student learning.

BONUS- Well actually 2 bonuses in this issue!

Bonus 1: Lecture capture is an excellent tool for helping students connect with your course materials and serves as a scaffolding strategy allowing students to interact with the material at their own pace. Here's an excellent article from Campus Technology about 6 Innovative Uses of Lecture Capture

Bonus 2: While we want our students to connect with their world we must remind them to be safe, to protect their information and be solid digital citizens. This article: Digital Citizenship: Resource Roundup presents an excellent collection of articles on everything from cyberbullying to media and digital literacy. Encourage your students to think before they post, tweet or comment. Additionally, remind them not all information is reliable, and that they should question and evaluate the validity, objectivity, and relevance of any source.